Letter From the Desert: Upheaval

Monument Valley in the rain, Monday 6/2/2025

The past week has been unpleasant. Or to be more precise, the usual burgeoning unpleasantness in the world was slightly amplified, from my perspective, by various betrayals visited on my by my body.

For the last decade plus I’ve been contending with restless leg syndrome and possibly its lesser known sidekick, Periodic Limb Movement of Sleep. (I have no idea why they used the wrong preposition, there, but that is what it is called.) For five years or so I have been cycling through different approaches to manage this little-understood ailment, including every potential non-homeopathic remedy you could possibly suggest.¹ Ropinirole worked for a couple of years, until it didn’t. Stretching and sitting in hot water and such help a little. Cannabinol in edible form works pretty well in a cocktail with THC and CBD, but it’s pricey. A couple years back my primary care MD suggested gabapentin, the other pharmaceutical drug regularly used for RLS/PLMS, and I gamely tried it, and was rewarded the morning after Night 1 with the worst hangover I’ve had since I quit drinking alcohol a decade ago.

But we got me to a sleep clinic a couple weeks back, and the doctors there suggested that the dosage of gabapentin my primary guy prescribed was three times what they’d recommend, and suggested I try starting at the lower dosage. And it worked! For 11 days. And then the hangover caught up with me. On Monday evening, after braving the deluges in Monument Valley, I got myself into a hotel in Williams, AZ and the ick hit like the flash floods I had somehow avoided earlier in the day. I assumed it was road food until I remembered that even the worst available road food never gives me splitting, whole-head headaches and dizziness.

I stopped taking the gabapentin after Tuesday night. It’s now Saturday and the hangover is finally starting to subside.

And thus endeth the TMI, which I bring up mainly as a way to explain why I haven’t gotten in touch with you about the interview we might have talked about in the last couple weeks, or (if we haven’t) why the podcast episode scheduled for Tuesday might be a day or so late. Or maybe not. It depends on the slope of my recovery’s curve.

I did get a chance to talk to some really interesting people in the week in Utah. I’ve already got two interviews in the bag, each of them quite different from the other. And still to be conducted are let’s see… *counts on fingers* four interviews people have agreed to and three I’ve yet to ask for. It was a pretty productive week, all things told.

But as rewarding as those meetings and new contacts have been, that wasn’t the best part of my trip.

The beginning of the White Rim trail from the Canyonlands National Park Visitor Center at Island In The Sky.

I gave myself a day off on Sunday last, woke up early, grabbed my new day pack and some water and headed for the Island in the Sky district in Canyonlands National Park for a short hike, to be concluded before it got too hot.

I chose Upheaval Dome as a venue for the new pack’s maiden voyage. I’d hiked there before.

Before

Thirty years ago, almost, my favorite ex-wife Becky and our dog Zeke and I stopped at Upheaval Dome on an epic several-week cross-country road trip. We had gotten into the habit of hiking separately, each of us alternately taking turns hiking and then staying in the nearest shady spot with Zeke, who was disallowed from most National Park trails on account of being a dog. At Upheaval Dome back then, Becky waved me toward the trailhead to hike first. I took the trail for a half mile or so, spent a few minutes at the first official view down into the crater, and then headed back. Becky grabbed her pack and hit the trail, and Zeke and I sat under a big juniper while I read The River Why by David James Duncan. Zeke found an interesting stick to work on.

Upheaval Dome, Canyonlands National Park.

Before long I realized it had been quite some time since Becky had started off: I’d polished off three or four chapters of the book, and Zeke had long since fallen asleep on a pillow of juniper berries. How long had it been? 90 minutes? Two hours? Certainly longer than it would generally have taken Becky to hike the whole route, even if she’d stopped along the way for a half hour nap.

I couldn’t follow my immediate impulse to follow her along the trail and see if she needed help: I couldn’t leave the dog by himself. I tried to relax. Becky was a capable and level-headed hiker, I reminded myself. She was certainly fine. I was just catastrophizing. I turned to Duncan’s next chapter, and read the first page of it several times over, not absorbing anything.

I put the book down. About five hours to sunset at which point I could put Zeke in the car and go looking. With any luck, a ranger would happen by well before that. How much water had she taken? It was still plenty warm out. Zeke woke, sensed my mounting upset, stared with me at the hill above the trailhead for a while.

And then there she was, walking slowly but talking animatedly with an older middle-aged couple, looking solicitous. Zeke and I walked toward them. Becky smiled a bit self-consciously, made introductions all around. The couple, avid hikers from the Gulf Coast, had gotten turned around on the slickrock. They’d been out there far longer than they had planned, long enough for the couple of pints of water they carried to have run out long ago. When Becky appeared in their field of vision they had begun beseeching the desert sky for divine intervention. She gave them water to drink, walked with them back to the parking lot, offering a quiet lesson in route-finding on ducked slickrock trails along the way. She got a letter from them every year until I moved out, and she may still.

Now

At the trailhead, I thought for a moment about that memory. I felt a rush of pride at Becky’s calm heroics, but that’s nothing new. I found the juniper that Zeke and I had waited with. Was it taller? My memory wasn’t sharp enough to know for sure. Memories of Zeke can bring me to tears without warning, even 18 years after his death.² I wondered if this whole body memory, the heat and smell and thin air and general solitude over the last few days would prompt a moment of sadness. But no: I was just… calm. I tossed my new pack over my shoulder and set off.

I stopped a few yards before the end. My right ankle started complaining, loudly, almost from the trailhead. I had no memory of injuring it, and thought I may just need to warm up a bit, but the pain was insistent. The hike wasn’t the idyll I’d imagined, but despite the ankle it wasn’t a death march, either. Instead, it was kind of a cautious slog, equal parts impatience and contentment.

So, good practice for the week to follow, is what I am apparently saying.

Also, the pack did fine. It might be the best day pack I’ve ever owned.

1. (So don’t. Unsolicited medical advice is condescending and rude. You’re better than that.)

2. The technical term for that length of grief is 0.9 Bojangles.